January 5, 2005 at 8:34 am
We have an 8 processor Windows 2000 Advanced Server that has 4GB of memory and when I open Task Manager, under the Performance tab I see about 4GB of Physical Memory and Mem Usage does not seem to go over 2GB.
I have looked at the SQL Server Properties Memory Tab and it is set to "Dynamically configure SQL Server memory" with the min at 0 and the max at 4GB. The Reserve physical memory for SQL Server is not checked. These values are set for both configured values as well as running values.
Is this normal or should SQL be using more than just 2GB or memory. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
January 5, 2005 at 8:41 am
Which SQL Server version do you use?
Also, see, if this helps:
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/awe_memory.asp
--
Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Webmaster: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs
My blog: http://www.insidesql.org/blogs/frankkalis/[/url]
January 5, 2005 at 8:53 am
We are using SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. What I don't exactly understand is that the article you pointed me to says not to use AWE if you have 4GB or less of memory and we have 4GB. It doesn't look like AWE will help with having only 4GB. I'm not sure about the /3GB switch. Should that be put in the boot.ini for my situation or not? I just don't know.
The only other thing that I can see is that when I run sp_configure, the max server memroy is set to 2147483647. This is what I am guessing is the problem. But can I just change that?
The following paragraph leads me to believe that if you have 4GB I can only use 3GB and one will go wasted, but wasting 1 seems better than wasting 2.
"The /3GB switch is used to tell SQL Server to take advantage of 3GB out of the base 4GB of RAM that Windows 2000 supports natively. If you don't specify this option, then SQL Server will only take advantage of 2GB of the first 4GB of RAM in the server, essentially wasting 1GB of RAM."
What should I do?
January 5, 2005 at 2:23 pm
An application by default will only use a maximum of 2 GB of memory. This is a limitation imposed by the operating system. If you want SQL Server to be able to use up to 3 GB of memory, you will have to use the /3GB switch. We have done that on a few of our servers and we see SQL Server consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.7 GB as a result. Keep in mind that of the 4 GB, the 1 GB will be used by the operating system and other apps that may need to run. So while it's not being used by SQL Server, most of it does get used.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
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